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Information technology, including sensors, radio frequency identification (RFID), infrared, the Internet of Things (IoT), automation mechanisms, geographic information systems (GIS), identification systems, and so on, are based on a high-density internet infrastructure and are adopted in various industries to raise productivity and efficiency and reduce costs and human resources. Although considerable information technology has been adopted, such as communications, the internet, data-processing methods, automation, and so on, technology is still upgraded and advanced. Applications are increasingly developed under existing information technology using adaptive processing mechanisms, especially for internet security and data privacy, to build a safer internet environment and suitable services.
Blockchain was noticed because Nakamoto (2018) proposed electronic currency in 2008. Gartner is a major data analytics company, which presents the top 10 strategic technology trends for the next year during the fourth season of the year. Blockchain was listed from 2017 to 2020, consecutively, which indicates its influence in data technology (Gartner, 2020). Blockchain has been applied in many fields, including financial applications, food supply chain management, medical services, logistic business, and education.
The ballot is a fair decision technique that is held for various purposes, such as representative member voting between nations, presidential elections in countries, decision-making in businesses, and opinion voting in families. Presently, voting is usually held in a traditional way, which includes attending the specified place in person and then receiving and casting a paper ballot. This method seems open and fair but has a higher cost on front-end works, including human and paper resources, and it is time-consuming and causes some unexpected chaos. Therefore, some businesses operate online voting using internet providers or communication applications, where the ballot environment is built based on internet-connected devices and a related application installation. Unlike traditional elections, online elections could be achieved without limitations of time and places. However, some privacy and internet security issues may be concerned; therefore, blockchain technologies are used to remedy them in this research. In which, there are some challenges of implementing ballot blockchain should be considered including the verification procedures of voters, the programming rules of the smart contract, and the policy making of preventing the vote cheating.
The existing traditional ballot has some problems involving amount of human resources, cost of places, equipment, time and traffic, and repeated procedures. This study is extended from the previous research (Fu, 2019), in order to solve problems with traditional elections, the blockchain mechanism design and development of ballot activities are proposed. The design is divided into three parts, including user registration, a secret ballot, and the ballot creation of the whole structure. In this mechanism, the characteristics of blockchain include decentralization, anonymity, incorruptibility, and encryption, which is adopted to build a reliable ballot blockchain. In this paper, the contributions include 1) accelerate the ballot processing procedures, 2) decrease the cost of human resources, software development and hardware devices, 3) raise the willingness of people to vote by reducing traffic time, and 4) increasing the flexibility of the voting procedure under the full security environment of the real-time ballot blockchain. The study is organized as related work which is composed of smart contract, blockchain and its technologies discussed in Background section. The procedures and tools of the ballot blockchain mechanism are described in the section of Main focus of the article, and the practical result of the real-time ballot blockchain is shown in Implementation section. Then, the concise conclusion is written in the end.